Author Archives: Michael Happy

Arnold J. Toynbee

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSDYytrYdUw&playnext=1&list=PLB9021297EC5026FD

Arnold Toynbee turns up, in all places, as a character in an episode of Young Indiana Jones, to provide an ominous historical perspective on events in Europe

Today is Arnold Toynbee‘s birthday (1889-1975).

Frye on history, metahistory, myth, and best-sellers in “New Directions from Old”:

We notice that when a historian’s scheme gets to a certain point of comprehensiveness it becomes mythical in shape, and so approaches the poetic in its structure. There are romantic historical myths based on a quest or pilgrimage to a City of God or a classless society; there are comic historical myths of progress through evolution or revolution; there are tragic myths of decline and fall, like the works of Gibbon and Spengler; there are ironic myths of recurrence or casual catastrophe. It is not necessary, of course, for such a myth to be a universal theory of history, but merely for it to be exemplified in whatever history is using it. A Canadian historian, F.H. Underhill, writing on Toynbee, has employed the term “metahistory” for such works. We notice that metahistory, though it usually tends to very long and erudite books, is far more popular than regular history: in fact metahistory is really the form in which most history reaches the general public. It is only the metahistorian, whether Spengler or Toynbee or H.G. Wells or a religious writer using history as his source of exempla, who has much chance of becoming a bestseller. (CW 21, 309)

$50 Billion

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The F-35: the jet we don’t need and can’t afford

We’ve entered the stage of the election campaign where there’s always the danger that issues give way completely to optics, the frivolity by which perceptions replace policy.

There’s much that can be said about the Harper government, but perhaps this figure sums it up: $50 billion. That’s the rounded off sum in corporate welfare Harper is proposing to shell out with taxpayer dollars.

Jets: $30 billion.

Jails: $13 billion.

Corporate tax cuts: $6 billion.

We don’t need any of these things, and they will certainly come at the cost of social spending. It’s a guarantee: a Harper majority government, after having squandered a surplus and run up record deficits, will demand “sacrifices” of those already footing the bill for his wish-list.

It’s our money. What law of economics requires that it go to Lockheed Martin and building contractors with Conservative ties and corporations already turning massive profits?

If there must be optics, let this be the filter.

Jacques Lacan

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iL6rkBSHS4A

A lecture on the unconscious and language with a dramatic interruption by a young audience member

Today is Jacques Lacan‘s birthday (1901-1981).

From “Lacan and the Full Word”:

I am not trying to kidnap Lacan for a religious program: I am merely trying to indicate the places where, in my study of the Bible, epigrams and observations I had read in Lacan began it reverberate. Both the Bible and Lacan present visions of the human situation, with occasional points of contact. But to see these points clearly we have to separate Lacan’s vision from his practice as a psychoanalyst, and the Biblical vision from questions of faith, with their many emotional imponderables. Any contemporary journal devoted to religious topics will confirm that thinkers who have withdrawn from most or all religious belief — Freud, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger — are quite as useful in defining those topics as those who have aligned themselves with such beliefs. The reason for this must be sought for within the nature of language, and the study of language, as I imagine few will deny, has not yet progressed so far into its real depths. (CW 18, 395)

Frye on Lester Pearson

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Lester Pearson receiving the Nobel Peace Prize

Further to yesterday’s post in which former Progressive Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney conspicuously does not endorse Stephen Harper but does praise Nobel Peace Prize recipient and former Liberal prime minister Lester Pearson as an example of how to run a productive minority government, here’s Frye in his 1972 Victoria College memorial address on Pearson:

Canada never gave him a clear mandate as Prime Minister, yet he managed to get through an extraordinary amount of legislation. His ambition for Canada was founded on his experience of external affairs: he wanted it to be, in the international scene at least, a quiet and sensible country, with no interest in fighting or aggression, devoting itself to discouraging fighting and aggression among its more powerful neighbours. We honour his memory today, not merely as a graduate of Victoria who achieved unique fame and admiration, but primarily as the faithful servant of a Master, who, as far as the political world is concerned, reserves his blessing for the peacemakers. (CW 12, 428)

Mulroney’s point is well-taken. Harper resembles nothing like the man described here.

In fact, a friend has observed that Harper’s policy can be characterized as simply jets and jails, neither of which we need. (Our crime rate, all across the board, for example, has been in decline for a decade.) But the fact that Harper insists on both jets ($30 billion) and jails ($13 billion) despite no demonstrable need for either says about all we need to know.

All of this is familiar as the politics of fear; just one of Harper’s many American imports designed to confuse, anger and render uncertain an increasingly intimidated public. It is not traditionally how we do things here, and there are increasing signs that this is beginning to show. Harper and Ignatieff were both in Hamilton on the same day last week. Ignatieff’s rally outdrew Harper’s three to one. This seems to be the slowly emerging pattern in the parts of the country that could swing the election, southern Ontario especially. As Mulroney said yesterday, Ignatieff could win this if things continue to break his way. The aura of menace Harper gives off is increasingly unpleasant, even threatening, and it seems to be all he’s got on offer. He calls it “stability.” To us it looks like a pathological need to control and an unhealthy appetite for power.

Quote of the Day: Mulroney Says Ignatieff Can Win

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From today’s Toronto Star, a report on TVO’s Steve Paikin’s interview with former Progressive Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney, who goes out of his way to withhold praise from Stephen Harper.  He does, however, offer effusive praise for the other party leaders, even saying that the Liberals could win this election under Michael Ignatieff. Ouch. He also praises former Liberal prime minister Lester Pearson, whom Mulroney cites as an example of how much a minority government can accomplish. Double ouch.

An excerpt:

“You’re voting for Mr. Harper, I take it,” said Paikin, coincidentally the moderator of Tuesday’s English-language leaders’ debate.

“At this point,” replied Mulroney with a pause that seemed to hang in the air longer than its mere second, “I’ll vote for the Conservative candidate in my constituency.”

Although the architect of decisive Progressive Conservative victories in 1984 and 1988 conceded that Harper is “clearly a competent Prime Minister,” his unease with the current Tory leader was barely concealed.

He praised Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff (“an intelligent man, hard-working guy”), NDP Leader Jack Layton (“an outstanding leader of his party”), and even Bloc Québécois Leader Gilles Duceppe (“respected in Quebec”), whose party began in 1990 as a separatist offshoot of Mulroney’s Tories.

He suggested Ignatieff could win despite polls indicating otherwise: “You never can tell what happens in political life. I’ll tell you this, in 1984, when the campaign started I was 14 points behind. We ended up in a rather different fashion.”

He touted former Liberal prime minister Lester Pearson, who endured similar political uncertainty to Harper, but had far more to show for his tenure, including medicare and the Maple Leaf flag: “You can do big things — even if you have a minority Parliament. Witness what happened with Mr. Pearson, who achieved great things with minority status.”

Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ga20M4XBgks

Trial witness Leon Welczilker describes mass executions

The trial of Adolf Eichmann began in Jerusalem on this date in 1961.

Frye in “Literature as a Critique of Pure Reason” on Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem:

We may recall the impression given to Hannah Arendt by the experience of attending the Eichmann trial, as recorded in her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem. What disconcerted her about Eichmann was not a sense of great wickedness or even of great stupidity, for either of which she would have been prepared. She felt rather that, so to speak, he wasn’t there: something impossible to define, but nevertheless at the core of real humanity, was simply missing. She developed from this a conception of “the banality of evil, which, I take it, was a philosopher’s way of putting clothes over the naked metaphor of “lost soul.” (Myth and Metaphor, 127-3)

“All the Young Dudes”

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfwVfEXJhQQ

A friend since childhood died a week ago today. I met him the first day of second grade and we were friends from then till now.

I know that this blog is not for personal disclosure. But the loss of people we love along the way until, finally, it is our turn, is something we all share. Sometimes our mortality bites down just hard enough that something gives way; the mundane becomes sinister, and our silly preoccupations seem eager to be gone because they’re leaving us one way or another. And that may make us wonder if the sources of comfort we call upon every day are illusions. Push them aside and we see where we really are, which is a transient little somewhere situated between two darknesses. Love is the gift we grant ourselves most confidently when life is sure and the end of it is still over the horizon. But push even that aside, and at some terrible proximate point there seems to be nothing at all.

Maybe this is the truth we turn away from whenever the inertia of just being alive carries us from moment to moment. It’s startling to see how short that stretch of memory — a lifetime’s worth — turns out to be. Any randomly chosen reminiscence from decades of accumulating them can, in the early stages of grief especially, be as easily plucked as a daisy in a meadow full of them. But there are still never nearly enough of them.

I know that when death came, my friend was resolute in taking hold of it. He was not a sentimental person and was not given to nostalgia, the one exception being a gruff concession to the things he could occasionally admit to love, which retained a fleeting power, like a sharp rising breeze.

He had disappeared from my life just over a year before, and then returned as the end approached. In January I posted some videos by David Bowie, half hoping he would see them, one song in particular; it was a call back to the youth we’d shared when the future had not yet devolved into a compromised and diminished present. He dropped me a line, tersely acknowledging that he’d been glad to hear the song, glad just to be reminded of it.

I knew him well, and can imagine what that last day and night might have been like. The increasingly less contingent plans patiently carried out point by point, and then the unself-pitying commitment to the last thing on his list to do. I knew him well enough also to believe that he might then have muttered a final sardonic self-deprecating remark: with your oldest friends it’s all well-understood cues, coded like the secret language of twins. I knew him well enough to believe that this might have happened. But I didn’t understand him well enough to guess how he must have felt when his determination had finally brought him to the last place where a choice had to be made. I am sure he was fearless. But the loneliness and the remoteness of it are unimaginable. However, this was his moment, and he made sure he experienced it alone.

He likely wouldn’t have been thinking at any point that day about the note he sent me back in January, or even of our two brief meetings in the last month, the second of them just the week before, which, it turns out, were simply last stops along the way. He had too much to keep in order, and had besides to maintain the resolve of someone who is in pain but not afraid. Those last modest exchanges of affection between us were just a late bit of ephemera in a life that was by now defined by loss. We sometimes have good reason to believe that unlooked-for joy might open up into an expanded life, but those moments elude those who are born in pain and who still have a life to live. I dwell upon this, not just because I’m grieving or because I am sentimental in a way my friend was not, but because in his small expression of happiness at hearing a song that stretched far back into a youth where everything was still possible, he was within reach one last time. After that, he somehow forgot how much he was loved.

I know that this reflection will not register as a matter of significance to most, and it is a common fate to be forgotten. But, as surely as my friend found death to be the companion he sought, I hold on to my love for him as someone I can never wholly lose. Beyond that I do not know. His life is in the love he leaves, if only between two darknesses.

Above is David Bowie’s “All the Young Dudes,” performed by Mott the Hoople — a band whose albums my friend in his teens continued to buy in the hope they could match this song. If you know it, you know that there’s an undertow of melancholy in it; it’s a rock ‘n’ roll anthem to the passing of things. What makes their passing bearable is the hope that they might not disappear completely. All the young dudes carry the news. My much beloved friend was one of them, and he always understood the news is never unambiguously good or bad. He was my traveling companion for four decades, and for most of that time capable of bearing the pain that overtook him year by year. It is not false comfort to know that, with a little less pain and a little more luck, he might have continued to do so. It is the news I carry.

Frye at the Movies: “Fahrenheit 451”

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWFmKt9NVMw

We know that Frye read Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, met him and then corresponded with him at least once (see “A Little Chrestomathy of Frye on Sci-Fi” in the Denham Library).  We don’t know that he saw the film adaptation of Bradbury’s novel, but it does seem to be the sort of thing he might take the time to see. Despite the very limited special effects available at the time, it is an elegant little mainstream movie that we knew how to make in the 1960s, and then evidently forgot. It was directed by Francois Truffaut in his only English language film. Truffaut with minimal fuss creates a dystopian world characterized by compact but comfy suburban homes equipped with bigscreen TVs that provide unending interactive entertainment to fill otherwise empty lives; all of which rings true, as does his depiction of a familiar in-denial conformity that quickly morphs into furtive but willing collaboration.

The mass-produced codex we call the book has served us very well over the last five hundred years. This makes Truffaut’s rendering of the incineration of thousands of books a terrifying sight it is difficult to forget, especially one extended sequence in which we watch in close up the covers of familiar books peeled away by the flames. It’s like helplessly witnessing a mass slaughter, reminding us that books are to be loved and cherished, if only because they have, in some form or other, proven to be the surest way the dead communicate with the living, and the living with the unborn.

The film has an excellent cast. Julie Christie plays both of the women in the protagonist Montag’s life: his fully co-opted and prescription drug-addicted wife, as well as the tenacious school teacher who guides him to freedom. The end of the film is subdued and modest but very moving. It remains one of the most vivid movie experiences of my childhood: people quietly becoming the books they love.

The rest of the movie is after the jump.  It is in English with non-intrusive Chinese subtitles — which by itself suggests that dystopias like the one depicted here may remain probable, but they aren’t inevitable.

(The movie, unfortunately, is not embedded: click on the image above and hit the YouTube link.)

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